Audio suddenly disappears when gaming
Hi!
I'm using an old work laptop as a gaming PC, but a bug is causing the audio to disappear every now and then.
Symptoms:
Every now and then, the screen briefly flickers or stutters and the sound disappears. The sound icon does not show as muted, and changing the volume does not bring the sound back. To get the sound back, I have to mute the volume, and then unmute. I can not recall this happening outside of gaming. The bug has happened both in steam games and non-steam games, usually when the PC is working hard.
Setup:
The PC is connected to my Optoma UHD35 projector, using NVIDIA High Definition Audio Driver. I do not know whether the bug would happen without being connected to the projector, as I've only played using the projector. The bug is very annoying as I want to ditch the mouse and keyboard and only use my gamepad. However, I have to have my keyboard nearby to mute and unmute sound. I'm guessing it is the graphics card that's struggling, since it happens when gaming and it is always linked to the screen stutter.
Attempted solutions:
I've tried updating the graphics card driver and the Realtek HD audio driver, and installing all updates in HP support assistant. The problem persists.
Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot or fix this issue? Or any ideas on how to map the mute key to a button on my controller so that I can at least use the workaround with my controller?
PC: HP ZBook Fury 15.6in G8 Mobile Work station PC
OS: Windows 11 Pro 25H2
Graphic cards: NVIDIA RTX A2000 Laptop GPU and Intel UHD Graphics
Audio drivers: Optoma UHD (NVIDIA High Definition Audio) and Realtek